by Linda Gordon
Kludd—chaplain
Naturalization—installing new members, who were then no longer aliens
Night-Hawk—courier and custodian of props; in charge of new recruits prior to naturalization
Terrors—the officers of a Klavern
APPENDIX 2: KLAN EVALUATION OF US SENATORS, 1923 *
State
Evaluation
ALABAMA
Two Democrats, Underwood, reactionary, and Heflin, progressive.
ARIZONA
Ashurst, progressive Democrat; Cameron, Old Guard Republican.
ARKANSAS
Robinson and Caraway, Progressive Democrats.
CALIFORNIA
Both Republicans, Johnson listed as progressive with a question mark, and Shortridge a machine man.
COLORADO
Has Adams—a recently appointed Democrat, and Phipps, Old Guarder.
CONNECTICUT
Brandegee and McLean—both reactionary Republicans.
DELAWARE
Bayard, untested Democrat, and Ball, a machine Republican.
FLORIDA
Fletcher and Trammell, both Democrats, the latter more progressive.
GEORGIA
Has Harris and George, good Democrats.
IDAHO
Borah is an outstanding progressive, and Gooding a “me too” Republican.
ILLINOIS
Two machine Republicans, McCormick and McKinley.
INDIANA
Ralston is a progressive Democrat; Watson has been a Republican machine leader.
IOWA
Has Cummins, Republican reactionary, and Brookhart, who is his own boss.
KANSAS
Curtis as a machine leader, with Capper somewhat on the fence.
KENTUCKY
Stanley, progressive Democrat on most issues; Ernst, colorless Old Guarder.
LOUISIANA
Ransdell and Broussard, both very conservative Democrats.
MASSACHUSETTS
Lodge is the dean of Republican reactionaries, with Walsh a progressive Democrat.
MARYLAND
Has Bruce, an untried Democrat, and Weller of the Republican Old Guard.
MAINE†
Both Fernald and Hale are Republican regulars.
MICHIGAN
Ferris is a progressive Democrat and Couzens, an independent Republican.
MINNESOTA
Both Shipstead and Johnson are ultra progressive.
MISSISSIPPI
Has Harrison and Stephens, good Democrats.
MISSOURI
Reed is an able Democrat, while Spencer will do anything the Old Guard machine thinks best.
MONTANA
Walsh and Wheeler, both able Democrats with the latter a real independent.
NEBRASKA
Has two Republican progressives—Norris and Howell.
NEVADA
Pittman is a progressive Democrat and Oddie an Old Guard Republican.
NEW HAMPSHIRE
Both Moses and Keyes are regular Republicans.
NEW JERSEY
Edwards is an untested Democrat and Edge a reactionary Republican.
NEW MEXICO
Has a progressive Democrat in Jones, with Bursum a machine Republican.
NEW YORK
Has Copeland, a liberal Democrat, and Wads-worth, Old Guard.
NORTH CAROLINA‡
Simmons is an able, progressive Democrat, with Overman, also of that party, but conservative.
OHIO
Has two regular Republicans—Willis and Fess.
OKLAHOMA
Checks itself, Owen being a liberal Democrat and Harreld a machine Republican.
OREGON
Both Republicans, with McNary a wobbler and Stanfield dependable from the Old Guard point of view.
PENNSYLVANIA
Has two Old Guarders—Pepper and Reed.
RHODE ISLAND
Gerry is a progressive Democrat and Colt a Republican regular.
SOUTH CAROLINA
Two Democrats—Smith and Dial, with the former more liberal.
SOUTH DAKOTA
Both Republicans, with Norbeck having progressive leanings and Sterling in the camp of the regulars.
TENNESSEE
Has two Democrats—Shields and McKellar, the latter progressive.
TEXAS
Both Democrats, Sheppard being a dependable progressive, with Mayfield, a new senator, said to be in that camp.
UTAH
King is a fighting, independent Democrat, with Smoot an expert Republican machinist.
VERMONT
Has one Republican—Greene—and a vacancy due to the death of Dillingham.
VIRGINIA
Swanson and Glass are good Democrats.
WASHINGTON
Has Dill, a progressive Democrat, and Jones, a sometimes independent Republican.
WEST VIRGINIA
Neeley is an average Democrat, and Elkins a completely colorless Old Guarder.
WISCONSIN
LaFollette is an outstanding liberal leader, with Lenroot a regular.
WYOMING
Has one of the highest class Democrats in Kendrick and an Old Guard wheel horse in Warren.
A partial decoding of the identifications used in these evaluations: A Democrat is usually someone the Klan considered a reliable supporter of its program; so is a progressive. Republicans, especially if labeled Old Guard, machine, or regular, could not be counted on; similarly with liberals. Note that Democrats are never characterized as “machine.” But some Republican senators were considered favorable to the Klan, especially if labeled progressive or independent. Punctuation as in original.
___________
* From the Fiery Cross, Michigan State edition, December 13, 1923, as reproduced in Rory McVeigh, The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), figure 12.
† Incorrect alphabetization in original.
‡ There is no entry for North Dakota.
NOTES
Introduction: “100% AMERICANISM”
1. Craig Fox, Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Michigan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 195; Richard Melching, “The Activities of the Ku Klux Klan in Anaheim, California, 1923–1925,” Southern California Quarterly 56, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 182; Kathleen Blee, Women of the Klan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 136.
2. In 1923, the Ku Klux Klan offered to purchase this university for $175,000, planning to expand it to the size of Purdue University and devote it to the instilling of Americanism. In fact, the Klan was never able to raise the money, and in 1925 Valparaiso was purchased by the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
3. Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 99.
4. Reliable figures on the second Klan’s membership are unavailable. Estimates of its size ranged from one million to ten million members. The lower figures are probably the most reliable, as both pro- and anti-Klan people exaggerated its size, and members left the Klan as often as new people joined.
5. Arnold S. Rice, The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics (New York: Haskell House, 1972), 367.
6. Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 40, quoted in Kathleen Blee and Ashley Currier, “Character Building: The Dynamics of Emerging Social Movement Groups,” Mobilization 10, no. 1 (February 2005): 129.
7. Charles Tilly defined social movements as a series of contentious performances, displays, and campaigns by which ordinary people make collective claims on others in his Social Movements, 1768–2004 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004). Sidney Tarrow defined a social movement as “collective challenges [to elites, authorities, other groups, or cultural codes] by people with common purposes and solid
arity in sustained interactions with elites, opponents and authorities” in his Power in Movement: Collective Action, Social Movements and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). John McCarthy and Mayer Zald defined a social movement as “a set of opinions and beliefs in a population which represents preferences for changing some elements of the social structure and/or reward distribution of a society” in their “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 6 (May 1977): 1217–18.
8. Coincidentally, the Klan also claimed the Boston Tea Party as an honored ancestor, naming it the first recorded Klan meeting.
Chapter 1. REBIRTH
1. Maxim Simcovitch, “The Impact of Griffith’s ‘Birth of a Nation’ on the Modern Ku Klux Klan,” Journal of Popular Film 1, no. 1 (Winter 1972): 45–54. Simcovitch makes the film largely responsible for the revival of the Klan.
2. Quoted in William Keylor, “The Long-Forgotten Racial Attitudes and Policies of Woodrow Wilson,” Professor Voices, March 4, 2013, http://www.bu.edu/professorvoices/2013/03/04/the-long-forgotten-racial-attitudes-and-policies -of-woodrow-wilson/.
3. The “Protocols” forgery appeared first in Russian in 1903 as Протоколы сионских мудрецов and is still widely available online. Klan editors would later gather the Dearborn Independent articles into a four-volume book, The International Jew. Robert Michael, A Concise History of American Antisemitism (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 139.
4. Simmons falsely claimed to have studied medicine at the University of Alabama. William Peirce Randel, The Ku Klux Klan: A Century of Infamy (New York: Chilton, 1965), 183.
5. Rice, The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics, 20.
6. Dawn, a publication of the Chicago Klan, October 21, 1922, quoted in John Mack Shotwell, “Crystallizing Public Hatred: Ku Klux Klan Public Relations in the Early 1920s” (MA thesis, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1974), 33.
7. Part of his appeal was calling for support for the war. Quotation from Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 147, 150.
8. Winfield Jones, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: Tocsin Publishers, 1941), 82.
9. William G. Shepherd, “Ku Klux Koin,” Collier’s, July 21, 1928, 8–9, 38–39.
10. Frank Bohn, “The Ku Klux Klan Interpreted,” American Journal of Sociology 30, no. 4 (January 1925): 395; Craig Strain, “Shearith Israel Renovates ‘All Southern’ Lanier University (1981),” Virginia-Highland Voice, January 1981, http://vahi.org/shearith-israel-renovates-all-southern-lanier-university-1981/. Ironically, the Lanier building later became a synagogue.
11. Charles O. Jackson, “William J. Simmons: A Career in Ku Kluxism,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 50, no. 4 (December 1966): 353–54.
12. William Loren Katz, The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan Impact on History (Washington, DC: Open Hand Publishing, 1986), 79. The contract is reprinted in Jones, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 228–30.
13. Jackson, “William J. Simmons,” 353–54.
14. Quoted in Randel, The Ku Klux Klan, 187.
15. Henry P. Fry, The Modern Ku Klux Klan (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1922), 37–51.
16. Stanley Frost, The Challenge of the Klan (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1924), 1.
17. Randel, The Ku Klux Klan, 191.
18. Bohn, “The Ku Klux Klan Interpreted,” 391.
19. Jones, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 141. That a social movement could be a business may seem eccentric today but was fundamental to the KKK’s organization, as we will see in chapter 4.
20. Katz, The Invisible Empire, 79; Rice, The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics, chapter 1; Randel, The Ku Klux Klan, 195.
21. Thomas R. Pegram, One Hundred Percent Americanism: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), 17.
22. William D. Jenkins, Steel Valley Klan: The Ku Klux Klan in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990), 7; Richard K. Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross: the Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Middle America (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1991), 93–94.
23. Fry, The Modern Ku Klux Klan, 31–32; Shepherd, “Ku Klux Koin,” 9.
24. Edgar Allen Booth, The Mad Mullah of America (Columbus, OH: B. Ellison, 1927), 39, and a memo of August 22, 1925, reproduced on 232-A; Jones, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 142.
25. Minutes of LaGrande, Oregon, Klavern, December 5, 1955, in Inside the Klavern: The Secret History of a Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, ed. David A. Horo-witz (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 99; Hiram Wesley Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” North American Review 223, no. 830 (March–May 1926): 33; Rice, The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics, 10–11.
26. M. William Lutholtz, Grand Dragon: D. C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991); Karen Abbott, “ ‘Murder Wasn’t Very Pretty’: The Rise and Fall of D. C. Stephenson,” Smithsonian.com, August 30, 2012, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/murder-wasnt-very-pretty-the-rise-and-fall-of-dc-stephenson-18935042/#7oEO a8oGSP2emP4L.99.
27. Todd Tucker, Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2004), 95; Alva W. Taylor, “What the Klan Did in Indiana,” New Republic, November 16, 1927, 330–31; Moore, Citizen Klansmen, 14.
28. Newell G. Bringhurst, “The Ku Klux Klan in a Central California Community: Tulare County During the 1920s and 1930s,” Southern California Quarterly 82, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 376; Blee, Women of the Klan, 168, 170; Kathleen Blee, speaking on NPR, http://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/03/19/390711598/when-the-ku-klux-klan-was-mainstream.
29. Rebecca McClanahan, The Tribal Knot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), chapter 12; also in Rebecca McClanahan, “Klan of the Grandmother,” Southern Review 32, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 344–62.
30. Randel, The Ku Klux Klan, 191; John T. Kneebone, “Publicity and Prejudice: The New York World’s Exposé of 1921 and the History of the Second Ku Klux Klan,” Virginia Commonwealth University Scholars Compass, 2015, http://scholars compass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=hist_pubs.
31. US House of Representatives, 67th Congress, Committee on Rules, Hearings on the Ku Klux Klan (Washington, DC: GPO, 1921).
32. Quoted in Charles Alexander, “Kleagles and Cash: The Ku Klux Klan as a Business Organization, 1915–1930,” Business History Review 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1965): 354. Shepherd, in “Ku Klux Koin,” claims that Georgia congressman William David “Wee Willie” Upshaw, who had been elected in 1919 with Klan votes, called for hearings because he figured that the publicity would help the Klan.
33. Llewellyn Nelson, “The Ku Klux Klan for Boredom,” New Republic, January 14, 1925, 196–98; Taylor, “What the Klan Did in Indiana,” 330–32; John Grierson, untitled review, American Journal of Sociology 31, no. 1 (July 1925): 114–15; Bohn, “The Ku Klux Klan Interpreted,” 385–407; Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1967), xiii; Wade, The Fiery Cross, 140; John Moffatt Mecklin, The Ku Klux Klan: A Study of the American Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924); Frank Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924).
34. Francis Butler Simkins, A History of the South (New York: Knopf, 1963), 545–46.
35. Malcolm M. Willey, untitled review, American Journal of Sociology 28, no. 3 (November 1922): 353–54; Rice, The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics; Randel, The Ku Klux Klan.
36. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 30.
37. The nine cities were Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Knoxville, Memphis, and Portland, Oregon. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 236.
38. Barron H. Lerner, “In a Time of Quotas, a Quiet Pose in Defiance,” New York Times, May 25, 2009.
39. Michael, A Concise History of American Antisemitism, 128, 134–35, 138.
&n
bsp; 40. C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 426, 473.
41. Bohn, “The Ku Klux Klan Interpreted,” 403.
42. Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), chapter 6; William F. Pinar, The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynching, Prison Rape, and the Crisis of Masculinity (New York: Lang, 2001), 577.
Chapter 2. ANCESTORS
1. Some claim that the term “Invisible Empire” emerged from Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s polite request to keep his support for the nascent Klan “invisible.” Others see it as a reference to the secrecy surrounding the original hooded fraternity. Kristofer Allerfeldt, “Invisible Empire: An ‘Imperial’ History of the KKK,” Imperial and Global Forum, July 7, 2014, https://imperialglobalexeter.com/2014/07/07/invisible-empire-an-imperial-history-of-the-kkk/.
2. Kathleen Blee distinguishes between conservative and right-wing movements, but I am not at all sure that the distinction holds up with respect to the Klan. Kathleen M. Blee and Kimberly A. Creasap, “Conservative and Right-Wing Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 36 (2010): 269–86.
3. Fox, Everyday Klansfolk. Masking in public was also banned in several localities, including some in Vermont, with no negative impact on the Klan. Interview with Maudine Neill by Mark Greenberg, 1988, Vermont Historical Society, Green Mountain Chronicles, http://vermonthistory.org/research/research-resources-online/green-mountain-chronicles/the-k-k-k-in-vermont-1924.